The spectacle of Wanda De Jesus storming out of her tony suburban Connecticut home, blazing away with two stainless-steel-plated 9mms, and bellowing, “Come on, you motherfuckers!”, almost makes the rest of Franc. Reyes’s gangbanging pseudo-epic worth sitting through. The ineptitude and the idiocy hurt the eyes — and then some scene pops up that’s so flamboyantly dumb, it must be intentional, perhaps with an eye to a future Grindhouse twin bill. But irony or homage was no excuse for Tarantino and Rodriguez, and it sure isn’t for Reyes, who despite showing promise in 2002’s Empire here takes his trash straight. De Jesus plays a widow who invested wisely (Microsoft!) after her dealer husband got whacked in the ’80s. She’s been spoiling her boy, Wilson Jr., up to now, but when the past catches up, it’s time to break out the Uzis. Let’s just say Brian De Palma’s Scarface has a lot to answer for.

Redacted The Iraq War movies are starting to resemble the war itself: miscalculated, mishandled, unpopular, and with no end in sight. Scialfa

Mission implausible Like the adrenaline shot that invigorates one of his characters, television wunderkind J.J. Abrams’s stab at the billion-dollar Tom Cruise spy franchise briefly gets your heart pounding, only to ultimately fail at bringing much-needed life to the latest reworking of Bruce Geller’s TV relic.

Black and blond She didn’t need an excuse to go out that night. Body dabble: Brian DePalma makes a mess of The Black Dahlia . By Peter Keough Dead flowers: James Ellroy on the movie and the obsession. By Peter Keough

Smoke screens What does it say about America that marijuana movies are a hot genre right now, perhaps hotter even than in the heyday of Cheech Marin and Tommy Chong’s 1978 Up in Smoke ?

The medium is the movie In almost every movie you go to these days you’ll see another screen — a television, a computer, even another movie screen — within the screen you’re watching.